With debates about the appropriate role for the federal government in public education increasingly polarized, the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, insisted on Monday that the administration would not back away from annual testing for students and performance evaluations of teachers based in part on the results of the tests.

In a speech on Monday to outline the administration’s priorities for a revision of No Child Left Behind, the signature Bush-era education law, Mr. Duncan said that “parents, teachers and students have both the right and the absolute need to know how much progress all students are making each year towards college- and career-readiness.”

Annual testing has become a point of contention in the often-bitter discussions about how best to improve public education.

The requirement that schools test students every year in reading and math between third and eighth grade and once in high school was enshrined in the No Child Left Behind Act. The tests were intended as a way for schools to see whether all student groups, but particularly minorities and poor students, were being taught adequately.

That law, which governs how $23.3 billion in federal education funding is spent and was passed with bipartisan fanfare in 2001, has been up for reauthorization since 2007. So far, Congress has been unable to agree on a new version. The House passed a bill in 2013, but the Senate version did not make it out of the Education Committee.

In a telephone interview Sunday night, Mr. Duncan said the primary purpose of the education law was to guarantee that public school students all have a chance at educational and economic mobility.

“Is this simply a good idea for some or is it important for all?” he said. “I don’t think any of us should feel comfortable if we’re going to just do something good for a few and neglect the many.”

Mr. Duncan said the administration was also committed to increasing federal funding for education and providing more support for teachers. President Obama’s 2016 budget would include a request for an additional $2.7 billion for the Education Department’s program, including $1 billion for the program that funnels money to schools with high proportions of poor students.

Mr. Duncan noted that a new education bill should include provisions for public preschool for all families who want it.

“We don’t have any kids where it’s O.K. to throw them away,” he said.

With a new Republican majority in Congress, leaders in the Senate and the House are expected to introduce versions of education bills this month, perhaps as early as this week.

In 2013, Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who is now chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, introduced a version of the bill that gave more freedom to the states to fashion academic standards and accountability systems for schools and teachers but that retained the annual testing requirement.

More recently, Mr. Alexander has indicated a willingness to listen to public criticism about annual testing. “Of course we should be asking the question: Are there too many tests?” he said in a statement.

Much of the furor around testing has focused on how the results are used in school ratings and, under policies promoted by the administration, in teacher evaluations.

“The use of testing for high-stakes consequential decisions rather than a fixation on strategies and interventions that are geared toward having all kids succeed has been the biggest problem,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers’ union.

A group of 19 civil rights advocacy organizations, including the N.A.A.C.P., the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, echoed Mr. Duncan’s call to retain annual testing as a way of gauging educational quality and equity, particularly for the most disadvantaged students.

“It’s really important for us to have data to help us analyze the progress that has been made,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in Washington.

Commissioners of state education departments, represented by the Council of Chief State School Officers, also called for a continued federal mandate of annual tests.

Education advocates said the fact that state leaders were calling for mandated yearly tests was particularly striking. “The people that you would expect to be delighted to be told, ‘You don’t have to,’ are saying, ‘No, make us do this,’ ” said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that works to close achievement gaps.

In his remarks, Mr. Duncan noted that No Child Left Behind was itself a revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, originally introduced half a century ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of a broader civil rights and antipoverty campaign.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: White House Still Backs Annual Testing in Schools. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe